A vaccine was discovered that stopped the progress of AIDS

pliknon

pliknon

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Not sure if you guys have seen this, thought it was really nice

http://my.webmd.com/content/Article/97/104268.htm

Nov. 29, 2004 -- It worked in mice. It worked in monkeys. And now in humans, a therapeutic vaccine has stopped HIV in its tracks.

The vaccine is made from a patient's own dendritic cells and HIV isolated from the patient's own blood. Dendritic cells are crucial to the immune response. They grab foreign bodies in the blood and present them to other immune cells to trigger powerful immune system responses to destroy the foreign invaders.

HIV infection normally turns these important immune system responses off. But animal studies show that when dendritic cells are "loaded" with whole, killed AIDS viruses, they can trigger effective immune responses that keep infected animals from dying of AIDS.

Wei Lu, Jean-Marie Andrieu, and colleagues at the University of Paris in France and Pernambuco Federal University in Recife, Brazil, tested the vaccine on 18 Brazilian patients. All had HIV infection for at least a year. Their T-cell counts -- a crucial measure of AIDS progression -- were dropping, meaning their disease was worsening. None was taking anti-HIV medications.

After getting three under-the-skin injections of the tailor-made vaccine, the amount of HIV in the patients' blood (called the viral load) dropped by 80%. After a year, eight of the 18 patients still had a 90% drop in HIV levels. All patients' T-cell counts stopped dropping.

The findings appear in the December issue of Nature Medicine.

"The results suggest that [these] vaccines could be a promising strategy for treating people with chronic HIV infection," Andrieu and colleagues write. "The significant decrease of viral load as well as maintenance of ... [T-]cell counts observed at one year after immunization are particularly promising."

The researchers warn that their study is only proof of principle. It's still not clear which patients do best with the vaccine, although there's evidence that vaccination should be given as soon after HIV infection as possible. Only clinical trials comparing people who get the vaccine to those who don't can show whether this vaccine really is an effective AIDS therapy.

Similar approaches are being explored for the treatment of cancer and long-term viral infections such as hepatitis C.
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it sounds more like a step in the right direction and loads more testing is to take place but any progress is welcome. But there's is probably still much time before the plag of the 80's is actually over.
 
LinkTriforceGC said:
To be honest... something is telling me not to belive it. *Shrug* I don't know, I mean I hope it true and everything.
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I don't know why you'd say that. As someone who has studied a bit of immunology, they're actually doing now what they should have been doing for chronic viral infections for YEARS. I don't even have my bachelor's degree in psych yet, but when I was an undergrad biology major I knew some things about viral infections, such as that any vaccines would have to be made from the viruses in the patients' own blood.

It's definitely taking a step in the right direction. Also, it's great that they mentioned it could be used to treat cancer cells too. Again, both cancer cells and quickly mutating virus strains can only be faught on an individual basis since they all have different protein patterns on the outsides of the disease causing cells.
 
didn't they already have this for about 5 years though?


OR are they now going to start mass producing it?


†B†V† :hat
 
i thing the ones from before just Slowed it down but didn't stop the virus from progressing. While this sounds it just about stops the virus from progressing or very little. (If i'm reading it correctly) Also the other medictions were very very expensive.
 
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